Our second week of landscape-related drawings, this theme specifically calling for a cliffside city. Unfortunately, I went with something more of a cliffside village instead. And I ended up drawing more of the cliff than anything else…

This scene depicts Seymour and Madison happening upon the Hidden Mountain Village shortly after embarking on their quest. Here, they meet and assist the shinobi siblings, Reikei and Aya, with recovering a stolen artifact. The hardest part of this piece was actually creating a believable sky and waterfall, as I had pretty good references for the cliff. I’m still also getting used to blending and shading with traditional graphite pencils, but that’s just one of many things I have to get used to and perfect.

Now that all the brief convention commotion has died down, we can get back to our regular posts. Pretty much every artist does fanart at one point, so let’s have a week of that, eh?

This is Jenassa, my errant traveling companion and talented face-stabber in Skyrim. I actually tried to put a proper background in this one, seeing as I need to try my hand at more landscapes, but I noticed something strange about halfway through: the background and the character did not interact with each other at all, and the character didn’t seem to fit anywhere in the background. My composition clearly needs work. So I separated the two (one of many reasons why Photoshop is awesome) and I suppose they stand reasonably well as individual pieces. Ah, well. So many factors to consider when doing an illustration, but I’m slowly learning.

I told Alex at work that if he wanted, he could send me some lines and I would color a picture for him. Alex took me up on this offer and sent me 2 really nice pictures of one of his original characters, so I went ahead and colored them up for him. Hope you enjoy!

~The scars will be ugly, but not the one who bears them. A memory of that distant thunder…~

Thanks to Czar for taking us back to the good ol’ days for this week’s theme! Too bad my childhood wasn’t eventful enough that I’d feature a part of it for my piece, so I revisit the past of one of my characters instead.

Said character is Reikei, a ninja who became the victim of a lightning strike as a child. The accident left him with scars on both hands, but also bestowed him with various psionic and psychokinetic abilities, due to the high amount of electrical current that passed through his body during the strike. He doesn’t utilize ninjitsu as is commonly associated with ninja, but rather hones a unique hybrid of the psionic energy and qi, which is then discharged through his hands in the form of free-running, combustive electricity or focused in the shape of blades.

I experimented with various brushes and colors to emulate a stormy, summer sky for the background, and a fresh, bleeding wound on Reikei’s hands. I’ve always referred to scars in the shape of Lichtenberg figures/feathering as “sunburst” scars (which I’ve recently learned the proper term), and I hoped to incorporate these patterns instead, but I find them too time-consuming to draw.

Something we all need practice with! This was very loosely based off a photo of Mt. Rainier–I used it for a bit of texture and lighting reference but it is by no means pixel for pixel. I learned many things about Photoshop painting this and also came to realize how much I don’t know. It needs another six or seven hours of work before I’ll be fully happy with it, but it’s pretty much presentable right now.

I considered including two of my OCs in this week’s submission, but the focus was on the setting rather than the people occupying it, so I’ll have to do just that for a future piece. :B

This is actually a setting from my story, a hilltop that provides a panoramic view of the main characters’ village and the surrounding landscape. The two characters, Madison and Seymour, frequent this hill to take in the star-strewn sky and on one such night, witness an impending attack on their village…

It was fun going the traditional route this time and using just pencils and a napkin for smudging – well, I also tried using a white gel pen for the stars, but they don’t… uh… gel all too well with pencil – for this piece. As common as they are as an art medium, I’ve been neglecting to use pencils in their various B’s and H’s for quite some time now, because I’ve always used a mechanical pencil.

For this one, I wasn’t really thinking about what to do before I started working on it.

I just wanted to start with the figure in a floating posture.

Despite the fact how much I like the ponytail + cat ears combination, I tried to stay away from cat girl with a ponytail. Also I tried to stay away from any mammal anthromorphs as same reason as Simon, and also, I attempted to minimize the animal-characteristics when in human form to make sure I stay bit away from furries.